The following discussion, taped in the spring of 1988, was held between Menachem Brinker, an Israeli writer and activist in the peace camp, and Dissent editors Mitchell Cohen and Irving Howe. Dissent: Twenty-one years after the 1967 war and the …
I have been living in Budapest for decades now, but I wouldn’t dare to say that I know the city. Everyone there seems to know something that I don’t. Simply looking at other people is enough to make me feel …
The decline of the Republican right and the renewed interest in major social legislation compels us to ask a crucial question: Can the welfare state fulfill its promise without a strong ethical core? In Western Europe that ethical core was …
This academic year, the New York Times Magazine observed the end of spring term with an article (“The Battle of the Books,” June 5) on the current anticanonical fashion in teaching literature. The Magazine has taken a noticeable interest in …
The French Fifth Republic is thirty years old. Its founder and first president, Charles de Gaulle, designed its constitution to achieve two overriding goals: to secure political stability by concentrating power in the hands of a strong presidency, and to …
Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, like many other intellectuals from the 1960s, have moved from anti-electoral positions to an intense interest in the American electoral process. In Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1977), they argued …
Tourist guidebooks say that Wall Street starts at Broadway and ends at the East River. Political analysts know better: at the end Wall Street changes into Pennsylvania Avenue. Economics alone can no longer explain the ups and downs of the …
We are pleased to print below two excerpts from a journal that Daniel Bell wrote after his trip to the Soviet Union last spring. The first excerpt describes a lecture he gave at the Leningrad State University.—Eds. In the afternoon, …
Here is a rich book—a dozen essays, of uneven quality, some hitherto unpublished, some published in inaccessible places, which, taken together, offer a conspectus of Herbert Gutman’s energetic genius. Yet the volume would seem shapeless and sprawling—now labor struggles in …
I’m not quite as sanguine as some Dissent editors about Dukakis but when you look at the other candidate, Bush caving in to the troglodyte right and its Quayle, there isn’t any choice but Dukakis. He isn’t going to set …
I first made contact with the women’s liberation movement twenty years ago, in the fall of 1968, when Linda Gordon showed me a copy of a magazine called No More Fun and Games, put out by an organization called Cell …
Michael Dukakis has been a liberal, a champion of fiscal responsibility and in his latest phase an enthusiastic practitioner of industrial policy, translated into cooperation between state government and corporate enterprise on terms exceedingly generous to the latter. His running …
It never fails. The man who survives the nutty primary system and wins the Democratic nomination is hailed for a while as a media genius—and his staff is full of geniuses, too. It happened to McGovern, Carter, and Mondale—and now …
We have received a copy of the following letter written by Professor Adi Ophir, who teaches philosophy at the Tel Aviv University, and we print it here for the information of our readers. —Eds. 26 June 1988 Mr. Yitzhak Rabin …
In Ronald Reagan’s America, Bob Kuttner has emerged as the Great Refuter. In The Life of the Party, Kuttner bemoans the paucity of Reagan Age journalists attempting to “influence the mainstream debate from the left.” Kuttner is the preeminent exception …